ModusGate is in fact an amalgam of different products which combine to offer a complete email security system, which is why the anti-virus capabilities are provided by McAfee or Norman.

There is no doubt that the software is intended for large deployments, evinced by its minimum system requirements – Pentium III 1GHz with at least 1GB of RAM.

The mail server aspect of ModusGate comes with a webmail server interface to handle its own mail. If you choose, however, mail can be relayed on to another host.

In common with a number of the products in this test, filtering rules can be managed from global settings down to domain/individual settings, giving excellent flexibility.

Spam is treated in any one of a number of ways: it can be deleted, quarantined, tagged, delayed, attachments can be removed, and it can be forwarded for analysis.

The filtering technology itself is based on several different systems, including subject line, keyword, heuristic analysis, blacklists, whitelists, honey-pot accounts, and what Vircom calls its Sequential Content Analyzer.

The wide-range of technologies being used ensured that it performed extremely well, with only a few rogue emails getting through. Any false-positives could easily be got around through the GUI so as not to repeat the error.

Updates are handled as you would expect, and can be downloaded periodically. The software logs its activity to a SQL database, although most of this is disabled.

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